Hot Shower, Cold Shower
Hot showers and cold showers are often held up as symbols of discipline.
Hot showers improve muscle relaxation, reduce soreness, better skin health. Cold showers improve muscle regeneration, and act as a switch in the mind — they jumpstart you, shock your brain into alertness.
Both are hard to take. Really hot showers and really cold showers feel genuinely uncomfortable.
But what if I told you they're not the hardest shower to take?
Enter the lukewarm shower
It's hard to mentally commit to something balanced. Bland food, bland learning — our brains are wired for binary logic. We seek the extremes.
Sometimes it seems like you have strong discipline if you take the path of the cold shower: work 15 hours a day, code 12 hours a day. Numbers that sound extreme but also sound impressive.
But warm showers are actually the hardest to take, for two reasons:
It requires friction. You have to actively tune it — not too cold, not too hot. That calibration is work. Nobody romanticizes it.
It feels weird. You want the immediate dopamine of the hot shower relaxing your muscles, or the sharp hit after stepping out of a cold one — that warm, triumphant feeling. The lukewarm shower gives you neither spike.
Why we avoid the middle
Cold showers make your skin dry. Hot showers make it very dry, and they're not optimal for skin health. Yet we do them anyway — because we're seeking that dopamine hit, we skip the middle ground where results aren't as exciting but outcomes are better.
Consider trading: the majority of traders are either day traders (instant dopamine, hot shower) or very long-term investors over 30 years (delayed dopamine, cold shower). Barely anyone occupies the middle — swing trading, moderate timeframes — even though it might be where consistent, compounding profits live.
Consistent and small. That's the definition of discipline. It's the warm shower archetype.
The flow state connection
This maps directly to the idea of flow. When something is too hard, it causes anxiety. When it's too easy, it causes boredom. The optimal state is the narrow middle — challenging enough to engage you, manageable enough to sustain focus.
The warm shower is the flow state of discipline.
So whenever you're making a decision on some kind of spectrum — how hard to push, how fast to move, how much to take on — consider the middle scenario. The path that seems boring. The one that doesn't make a good story at the extremes.
Discipline is boring. Warm showers are boring.
Discipline is hard. Warm showers are harder than both.
— hari (hmk)